


Small Steps in the Dance

by AriadneKurosaki



Category: Bleach
Genre: Alternate Universe, Drabble Collection, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-06
Updated: 2020-12-22
Packaged: 2021-03-06 19:13:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,390
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26313964
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AriadneKurosaki/pseuds/AriadneKurosaki
Summary: A collection of very short stories about Ichigo and Rukia.
Relationships: Kuchiki Rukia/Kurosaki Ichigo
Comments: 9
Kudos: 29





	1. Headphones

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt: Day 11, You can tell me anything, I won't listen though
> 
> This is so short that I originally posted it solely on Tumblr.

Ichigo has enormous headphones. They loop over his head and cover his ears in bright blue plastic and padding. He also turns his music up _loud_. Soul Society isn’t exactly teeming with opportunities to listen to music, and the entire idea of pre-recorded melodies is a new one to Rukia. At best, sometimes Byakuya nii-sama hires a musician to play the shamisen or the shakuhachi. It’s _very_ different from the pounding, tinny noises that leak out of Ichigo’s headphones.

When he wears them, the combination of the padding and volume means that he really can’t hear anything Rukia says. The downside of this is that she has to yell at him to get his attention when there’s an alert on her denreishiki, or when she needs help filling out one of the homework sheets from school (not that her grades actually _matter_ since she’s not a real student, but she has her pride). Once or twice she’s had to rip them from his ears altogether and listen to him bitch about it before he listens to whatever she’s saying.

The upside is that the first time she accidentally says what she’s thinking out loud and tells Ichigo that he looks _hot_ , with his hair mussed from running his hands through it, his big headphones, and no shirt because it’s the middle of August and the whole city is a sauna, he doesn’t hear it. She has time to come up with something else before he takes his headphones off and asks her what she said.

So when they’re in his bedroom and he is bobbing his head to some of his heavy metal from Europe and Rukia sees how soft he looks in that moment and finds herself murmuring that she loves him – Ichigo doesn’t hear her. He can’t listen past the noise pumping into his ears.

Rukia is relieved, she tells herself.

When he asks her what she’s blushing about a few minutes later she babbles something nonsensical about the manga she is reading and Ichigo looks a little disappointed. But all he says is, “Whatever, midget,” and puts his headphones back on.


	2. The Legend of the Entwined Birches

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Far into the forest, in the center of a clearing grew two trees.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I blame the Quadforce for this.

Far into the forest, in the center of a clearing grew two trees. An elegant white birch rose into the air next to a birch with bark as black as night. No one knew when or why they had been planted, but over time the branches wove together so that they could not be separated. The trees grew together for a hundred years, and around them grew a town, but the trees remained untouched, nestled in a garden in the center of the town square.

Their branches provided shade to all who sheltered beneath them, blooming with bright green leaves in the spring and summer that turned orange and golden in the fall. Children played in its shelter and old men played games of Chess amidst the leaves. Eventually a story grew around the entwined trees: the story that two star-crossed lovers, tied by the red string of fate but bound from one another by an unfortunate destiny, had been buried when they defied all laws and perished together. The story told of trees that sprung from their graves unbidden, to twine together and serve as an eternal memorial.

The more gentle version of the story, the one told to children, was that the lovers themselves planted the trees as a symbol of their undying devotion.

Eventually, a rumor began that if a couple wrote their names on a piece of paper and tied it to a tree branch, their love would endure a lifetime and beyond. Lovers wrote their names on paper tags, and in the first summer after the rumor began a few fluttering white tags blew on the breeze alongside green leaves. Later, tags hung from the branches by the thousands, as word spread far beyond the boundaries of the town. In the winter faded paper, blown by the harsh winds, mimicked the leaves of summer.

Time passed. The town grew into a city. The birch trees endured, although even the most skilled arborist could not have said how, for the white birch should have died decades ago and even the black birch was approaching the end of its lifespan.

“Hurry up, Ichigo!” A petite woman in a white silk wedding dress and a fluttering veil covering her raven-black hair ran toward the trees, skirt lifted high to avoid tripping on it.

She was followed at a more sedate pace by a young man in a tuxedo. His bright orange hair fluttered in the spring breeze as he hurried to catch up to her. Their wedding party trailed behind them, parents and siblings chattering happily as they made their way to the trees.

He caught her as her feet hit the grass, and Ichigo swept his bride into his arms, lowering his lips to hers. “I’m here, Rukia,” he said unnecessarily, and grinned at her.

“Do you have the tag?” Rukia asked when they parted, and Ichigo pulled a long white tag from the inside pocket of his jacket.

“Right here, with our names already written on it.” Together they found a branch, one without too many others, and Ichigo lifted Rukia by the waist so that they could wrap the red thread trailing from the tag around a branch and tie it securely.

They had an audience when they were done, and as their family cheered, Ichigo and Rukia kissed beneath the shade of the entwined birch trees.


	3. Bedtime Stories

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Their daughter loves a good fairytale.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was originally written for IchiRuki Month day 8, East of the Sun and West of the Moon. But then I felt this was a little bit too easy and ended up writing Go East.
> 
> This is a modern AU.

Their daughter is only two years old when she starts asking Ichigo and Rukia to tell her fairy tales at bedtime. Sumiye Kurosaki is as precocious as her name implies, and by the time she is four her parents find themselves telling her stories that they would have thought were a little too old for her.

Ichigo checks out books by the armful from the library, where the librarian in the children’s section laughs politely whenever he asks her to double-check whether he’s borrowed any of the books already (he is finishing a Doctorate in Psychology while working part-time and sometimes he’s not sure which way is up). Rukia dusts off the old storybooks that her sister left behind when she died, and they go through those shockingly quickly.

“Eat your broccoli and I’ll tell you a _new_ story after dinner tonight, Sumiye-tan,” Ichigo tells her when she tries to avoid eating her vegetables. “The librarian had this book brought in from a library in Tokyo just for you.”

“Yes, Tousan,” Sumiye says obediently, and the broccoli disappears quickly despite the training chopsticks she is still using. Not that Ichigo would have denied her the book. She is like a carbon copy of Rukia with her big violet eyes and cap of black hair (messier than Rukia’s – she inherited his hair texture), and she already has Ichigo wrapped around her finger.

Ichigo and Rukia clean up after dinner while Sumiye watches an episode of Chappy on television, and then it’s time for bed. Rukia carries Sumiye into her room while Ichigo retrieves the promised new book.

“This one,” he says proudly when their daughter is nestled in her bed with her favorite chappy plushie, “Is called East of the Sun and West of the Moon. It’s Norwegian and it’s over a hundred years old.”

“That’s not very old,” Sumiye complains, and Rukia snickers from her spot at the foot of her daughter’s bed.

“It’s not as old as _some_ ,” Rukia agrees, “but it’s still an old story.”

Ichigo scowls at his wife and daughter but begins reading: “Once upon a time there was a poor peasant who had so many children that he did not have enough of either food or clothing to give them. Pretty children they all were, but the prettiest was the youngest daughter, who was so lovely there was no end to her loveliness.”

He paints a picture for her of a beautiful woman with skin as fair as the moon and eyes like amethysts, and black hair that is soft as silk, with nary a hair out of place except for a bang that always hangs between her eyes. Rukia looks at him a little skeptically for that, but he just grins at her and keeps reading.

The youngest daughter eventually agrees to marry a big, white bear in order to save the rest of her family from poverty, and he carries the girl off to his castle, Ichigo explains.

“Isn’t it wrong to marry an animal?” Sumiye asks.

Ichigo clears his throat. “Well, that’s part of the story, you’ll see. No jumping ahead.”

He tells her how the bear turns into a man at night but only in the dark, and how the young woman grows tired of being all alone in a castle all day. “There isn’t anyone else in the castle, you see, except for invisible servants. So she doesn’t have any friends.”

After the girl makes an ill-fated trip home, he says, her mother convinces her to light a candle in order to see the man she married.

“Which she did,” Rukia sniffs, “foolish girl. But it turns out that she’d married a _very_ handsome man, a prince in fact, with a fair face and hair bright as an orange sun.” She grins at Ichigo when he grumbles and blushes a little.

“Yes, but she dripped melted tallow – that’s what they used for candles back then – on his shirt and it woke the prince up,” Ichigo paraphrases. “And the prince told her that he had been cursed to be a bear during the day and a man at night, and that because of her lack of faith, she would be taken away from him and he would be sent to a castle east of the sun and west of the moon.”

Rukia takes the book from him and she reads on for a while, telling her daughter about a trip of many days on horseback, of collecting a golden apple, a golden carding comb (“it’s used to comb wool from a sheep,” Ichigo adds helpfully), and a spinning wheel.

“How is she carrying a spinning wheel around?” Sumiye asks.

“Ah…it’s a small one,” Rukia decides. “But that’s not the important part. The important part is that even the _winds_ helped her. The north wind, the oldest and strongest of them, blew and blew until he carried her all the way. Finally, she arrived at the castle that’s east of the sun and west of the moon. And do you know what she found?”

“What?”

“Trolls! There was a whole castle full of trolls keeping her husband captive, and they planned to make him marry the daughter of the head troll.”

“Ew. You wouldn’t let Tousan marry a troll, would you Kaasan?” Sumiye asks. Rukia laughs behind her hand.

“Of course not, Sumiye-tan. In fact, I saved your father from marrying a troll.”

The words make Ichigo laugh incredulously, and he tugs Rukia onto his lap, heedless of the face his daughter makes. “She was _not_ a troll, she was just…overeager,” Ichigo corrects his wife.

“ _Anyway_ , the woman needed to figure out a way to get her prince back. She knew that trolls liked shiny things, so she played with the golden apple, and when the troll princess came outside and asked for it, she traded it to the troll in exchange for a night with her prince.”

“Is this a kissing thing?” Sumiye makes a face.

Ichigo and Rukia exchange a look. “Well, not exactly. But a lot of fairy tales have kissing in them. Remember when we read _Sleeping Beauty?_ ” Ichigo asks, and his daughter sticks her tongue out.

“Sadly, the troll tricked the woman, and gave the prince a sleeping potion. While the woman spent the night in the prince’s room, she couldn’t wake him no matter what she did,” Rukia continues. “The same thing happened the second night: the woman gave the princess the golden comb.”

“And the same thing happens the third night?” Sumiye guesses.

Ichigo shakes his head. “The trolls had other prisoners, and they had heard the woman trying to wake the prince. They were moved by her pleas and told the prince what had happened. So on the third night, the prince only _pretended_ to drink the sleeping potion, and reunited with the woman who had traveled so far to save him.”

“And they lived happily ever after?”

“Not yet,” Rukia cautions. “First, they needed to escape the trolls. The prince decided that he would ask the troll princess to wash his shirt – the one with the three spots of tallow on it.” She looks up at Ichigo and whispers, “This is really sexist.”

Ichigo snorts. “It’s a story from a hundred years ago, what do you expect?” he grumbles back.

“Well. Anyway, the prince gave the shirt to the troll princess the next morning and said he would only marry the woman who could wash his shirt. The princess washed and washed, but she couldn’t get the spots out – they only got worse! Her mother grabbed the shirt, and _she_ made the spots even bigger. In fact, every troll in the castle tried to wash the shirt, until it was practically black.”

“Finally, the prince had his real wife wash the shirt, and she had barely dipped it in the wash water before it became white as snow. The trolls were so angry that the troll stepmother exploded on the spot, and so did the princess,” Ichigo recites.

Sumiye looks skeptical. “They _exploded_?”

“Trolls explode sometimes,” Rukia says sagely. “With that, the trolls were defeated, and the prince and his bride set all the other prisoners free. They took all of the gold and expensive things from the castle and fled, and the prince and his bride lived happily ever after.”

“Another!” Sumiye promptly commands, and Ichigo leans over and taps his finger against the tip of her nose.

“We’ll tell you another story tomorrow night. It’s time for bed and you have school in the morning,” he says.

Once Sumiye is tucked into bed, Ichigo and Rukia retire to the sofa and curl up with the television on low.

“Saved me from a troll, hm?” Ichigo asks.

Rukia looks up at him and grins. “Mhm. And I didn’t even have to do your laundry.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some lines of dialogue are from East of the Sun and West of the Moon as retold [here.](https://www.pitt.edu/~dash/norway034.html)


End file.
